This is the logbook of the first instance of the worksession Dwars Down Delà. This session took place in the summer of 2021 in Bassange, in the province of Limburg in Belgium. Because of a huge flooding, we were mostly deprived of electric and human energy to do proper documentation on the spot. Therefore, below, we recollect some memories through images of places. Description of the worksession is on the link above.
These rocks breathe.
It was all about location. It was important we were on a hill, the floodings happening around were really present.
The idea was to make different narrations, thinking about histories for who and by whom.
The weather and the site itself became strong collaborators.
For the worksession we camped in an overgrown stone quarry that is normally used for groups doing survival training. The site is off grid and we decided not to use the generators. Apart from The Outdoor Kitchen, The Campfire and The SurvivAll Roof, it also houses two big army tents, a chemical toilet and a showerblock. There are systems to collect rainwater; drinking water was brought onsite in small containers. The tents were scattered over the terrain. The terrain was muddy and some tents were not watertight. Some people slept in the army tents. One night, Brita and Tina moved their tent inside the army tent and had to dig a ditch to divert the rainwater.
Yasmine and Felix set up a Clay Station here but the clay was too humid. The first sculpture was in the shape of the animal of which ‘Belemnite’ fossils were found everywhere on the site.
On the terrain of SurvivAll is a fenced off corner with entrances into several mining tunnels. The main tunnels are relatively large, when you go further they are narrower. The entrance is a kind of gallery, at least five meters high. You could see the silex in layers in the wall. It is a low-key part of the museum (there were panels on the wall).
The main tunnel was used for a video projection by Monica. The final stage of the audiotour arrived here and proposed a sonic improvisation.
The Outdoor Kitchen is under a wooden structure with a metal roof, around fifty square meters. Under it are tables, chairs and a bar with tea, coffee etc. We usually only had a coffee in the morning. It was a place for getting together for drinks, and when it rained we could stay under the roof, if the weather was dry we would sit around the campfire.
At some point, some of the tents were moved under the roof when the rain was too strong.
We regurarly met here to discuss. The first evening we introduced ourselves and discussed the Constant Collaboration Guidelines.
On Friday, we read Mia’s Speculative Funding writing forms. She had worked on it all week, she wrote down an application form by an imagined unlimited fund to which anyone could ask money to and the participants were invited to fill it in with their own fantasies .
Rosa read together with participants poetry that they had written and translated.
Julie read from The mushroom at the end of the world (Anna Tsing).
We tried to work with the bat detectors that were soldered throughout the week with Brita and Tina.
Under the roof Elodie and Mia moulded some clay sculptures which we baked altogether in the evening campfire.
The structure looks the same as the Outdoor Kitchen, but it is half of the size with only one table under it. It is next to The Outdoor Kitchen.
On Wednesdays it is used by the SurvivAll gang who cook together every week.
Felix and Yasmine used it as their workspace, and were relocated to The Outdoor Kitchen after Wednesday.
On Thursday some participants gathered here for a bushcraft workshop. We learned some knotting techniques from the ropemaster, and how to light a fire, from gathering wood to lighting it with a firestick. They taught us all kinds of safety gestures when handling knives.
The Garden is the site that participants had to pass every day on their way from The Campsite to the Worktent. It is between the tower and the restaurant in Moulin de Brouckay.
Yasmine and Felix gathered clay from this site. The clay was first gathered on The Campsite to make sculptures under the roof but because of the rain it stayed too humid for them to solidify. Finally they decided to move their sculptures into the garden and let them melt into the ground. They hosted participatory sessions to make collective sculptures.
Julie read a logfile while walking through the garden.
The Hangar is a metallic structure located in between the campsite and the tower. It is a bit hidden. It is used as a storage place for the museum, and it is filled with wood. We could use this space for ‘dirty work’ and activities that did not need electricity. The biggest mushroom that we found this week was displayed in front of The Hangar.
ooooo was working here on The Powers of Ten, and made a set-up for inviting others. After a while they moved the same set-up to the working tent. There was a camera device suspended from the ceiling to make a series of images from a picnic plaid on which two participants at a time were asked to display objects.
The Tower is a seven floor construction made of silex. It looks medieval but it is in fact not. Inside there is a museum, with on the first floor a scenography of the intention of the tower: Egalite, Creation, Fraternite, Penser. It houses a documentation centre, a library with material on the tower and people involved.
Corry Schoenmakers is responsible for the asbl of The Silex Museum and managing many things around it. She took the group of participants across the site, connecting the different locations. She made a short history of the symbols, the history of Robert G and The Geolog(ic)um, a separate structure. Her tour mixed histories of people, places and stones.
On the night of Wednesday-Thursday, Hamza projected a digital calligraffiti at the back of the tower and invited the participants to draw a collective projection. Yasmine and Felix constructed a roof to host the ‘infl3ctor’ and to keep it out of the rain. Eventually, it was a combination of improvisations, collective drawings and Hamza’s writing.
Chloe, Olivia, Amy together made a guided tour which also extended to The Garden and The Silex Mine. It was an oral meditation connecting the elements present in the environment and offered ways to connect to it. The audioguide invited listeners to make sonic improvisations in the mine. The guided tour was semi-live and hosted on the Signal app.
The Powers of Ten proposal by ooooo was also installed here at the final day, to make a group picture.
The Moulin de Brouckay is next to The Worktent. It is a small canteen in the former stone brokers mill where silex was broken in smaller pieces, with a terrace that normally opens as a restaurant. You cannot really see this from the inside, most features have been removed. For the worksession, they provided us with breakfast, lunch and dinner. In return for paying this food, we could use the spaces around the mill, such as The Worktent. The restaurant is off-grid as well and powered with the help of a large generator.
During the first days everything went as planned, but the cooks were not used to cook vegetarian meals. But later in the week, when the floodings in the village were really bad, only Tariq was left to cook for us. His food was great, and we started to bond with him. On Saturday everyone came back, there were six or seven people.
One of the backrooms in the mill was used by Rosa to host a poetry workshop. She used classic structures (alexindrins) for constructing the poems, and each participant wrote a poem and then the poems where translated while keeping with the original structure.
At the end of the session, we discussed the tools that the participants brought to the session.
The Worktent is a big, white, permanent tent with a wooden floor that normally would be used for bigger parties and weddings. It was used as a collective workspace. There were six big gasheaters, so this was the place to dry wet socks and clothes; some heaters were dedicated for drying and others for heaters.
The Cimentière de Lixhe is ten minutes by car from the tower. It is still in use, no longer for extraction of marl, but for storage of stone rubble that comes from other mines. It is a huge terrain and has a highway running through the middle. It is exploited by the company CBI.
We had a tour by two independent guides, one in French by Brigitte Vanopdenbosch and one in English, by Marc Hernou. They were both working for Education-Environnement. Brigitte was trained in guiding through quarries. She introduced the space by talking about how it used to be when it was still under water and the animals that used to live there, and pointed out fossiles. At the moment, they are re-naturing the quarry so part of it was a lake and different animals installing themselves there at the
moment. She spoke about the amount of cement used by Belgian citizens: 550 kg of cement per person per year! Cementries are responsible for 8% of the global CO2 production per year, which is twice the amount produced by aviation. After showing the industrial and geological history of the place and the initiative of CBI to renature, she asked us what we thought of it. Most people felt ‘giving it back to nature’ was a hypocritical gesture and she seemed surprised by our responses.
The Fort was 15min drive from the Moulin de Brouckay. It is a huge structure dug into the landscape made of concrete with many kilometers of tunnels, tunnels and tunnels of which we only visited a tiny bit. It was built over many years, and held only for one night because in WWII the Germans landed on the roof in airplanes for which the architecture was not prepared. Inside is a small museum with an elaborate vintage scenography with lots of mannequins, somewhere between funny and bad taste mise-en-scene. It was interesting that it was seen at the time as the strongest fort possible, but in fact it was out of date as soon as it was finished.
This is where Julie found the mega-mushroom!
Florent proposed to re-enact the awkward scenography.
ooooo arrived to the worksession by boat
in The Harbour. They needed to go there regularly to oversee the rising water levels and whether the boat was safe. When things got bad, they also helped people that needed to evacuate the harbour but were not offered any help by the authorities to do so.